Which location do you think is better prepared for the transition to clean energy: the wealthy, green-minded city of San Francisco, or the poor, rural villages of East Africa? If you picked the African villages, believe it or not, you’re on to something. An incredibly innovative startup called Off.grid:Electric has spent two years working to …
Just came across this bizarre story on Nextnature.net: Tired of spending time, money and energy on preparing meals, [Rob Rhinehart] decided to find a new way to survive without actual food. He created a unique mixture called “Soylent”, which contains nothing but the elements the body needs: iron, vitamins, fat, calcium and dozens of other …
Okay, so you’re a smart, responsible citizen of the world and you want to know what’s going on around you. Are you more likely to flip open a newspaper – or flip open the laptop? Well, a new survey suggests people are now putting as much trust in social media, like Facebook, for news, as …
Welcome to Cosmic Revolutions’ Topic Guides, where we wrap up a series of articles on a common theme. This week, let’s look at one of the biggest tags at Cosmic Revolutions: Sustainability. Sustainability is all about whether we humans survive as a civilization, and how well. Earth’s resources are finite, meaning the our growth potential …
The best way to solve the world’s hunger problem is a hotly debated topic. In the next few paragraphs, I’ll take a look at one fairly conventional idea, and explore another proposal that’s a bit more out of the box. But in the end, I’d like to poke at some of the assumptions underlying both …
Three times a week, I go to the gym on my way home from work. And three times a week, I ask myself the same question: isn’t this a waste? I don’t mean the exercise. A longer lifespan, plus reduced risk of Alzheimer‘s and cancer, is all the justification I need. No, I’m talking about …
Picture this: it’s the near future, and you’re on a first date. You’re at an average restaurant in the suburbs, somewhere in the US. Your date, like half the people in the restaurant, is wearing a flat pin the size of a postage stamp on one lapel. As if you didn’t have enough reasons to … Continue reading »
Imagine you could build the city of the future, from scratch, right now. What would it look like? What would it do? It’s not a hypothetical question. According to this Salon article, software developer Plan IT intends to do exactly that: “Plan IT Valley” will be a new city located in northern Portugal, and is … Continue reading »
Imagine you’re on a long train ride. Bored, you turn to the landscape rolling past the windows, and decide to dress it up a bit. You conjure up some flocks of exotic birds to hang in the sky, and a few horses that appear to be running alongside. Before you know it, you’ve arrived at … Continue reading »
Social networks like Facebook and G+ are great, but they all harbor a major bias: they’re restricted to human users only. Robots, tired of the lack of access and the blatant discrimination, have taken matters into their own hands and created a social network of their own. When the machines eventually rise up in revolt, … Continue reading »
Last week, I skeptically dissected a book preview from futurist Douglas Rushkoff, whose forthcoming book Present Shock will tackle issues like sustainability, sufficiency and corporate dominance of the economy. The preview he wrote was quite short, and while intriguing, it brought up many more questions than it answered. Now, Co.exist (who featured the article originally) … Continue reading »
It’s no surprise that this preview for the book Present Shock, called “Why Futurists Suck,” would catch my eye when someone passed along the link: It’s hard not to take it personally when someone goes so far out of their way to denigrate futurists! But a quick read through the article on Good.is suggests the … Continue reading »
The world is a complicated place, as you can tell if you’ve ever tried to predict the weather or the stock market, or if you’ve taken a single glance at the Schroedinger equation governing all physical particles. Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a way to visualize such systems and processes? And wouldn’t it … Continue reading »
